by Colin Wilson
But was the ‘witchcraft craze’ really smoke without fire?
The remark in the Canon Episcopi (dating from about the 4th century AD) about the pagan goddess Diana offers an interesting clue. Why Diana, the Roman moon goddess?
Because from the very beginning, the history of magic has been associated with the moon. Diana was also the earth goddess—and therefore the goddess of fertility. This association of witches with Diana can be found throughout the centuries. In the 1880s, an American scholar named Charles Leland became fascinated by the English Gypsies—as George Borrow had been half a century earlier—and became president of the Gypsy Lore Society. In 1886 he went to Florence, continuing his studies of Gypsy magic and lore, and encountered an Italian witch named Maddelena, who told fortunes and sold amulets. He employed Maddalena to gather what traditions she could about the origins of Italian witchcraft, which was known as la vecchia religione, the old religion. She finally provided him with a handwritten manuscript called Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches. This tells the story of how the goddess Diana had an incestuous affair with her brother Lucifer, and gave birth to Aradia (or Herodias); it was Aradia who eventually came down to earth and taught men and women the secrets of magic. This, according to the Gospel of the Witches, was because the Church and the aristocracy were treating the poor with such cruelty that Diana felt they needed to be provided with some means of self-defence. That is to say, witchcraft was originally a movement of social protest, like the Peasant’s Revolt. In his Witchcraft, Magic and Alchemy (1931), Grillot de Givry hits upon the same idea: ‘... it is perfectly logical that certain men ... having seen that God possessed his rich and honoured Church on earth ... should have asked themselves—above all, if they believed that they had a right to complain of God, Who had condemned them to a wretched state of life and denied them worldly goods—why Satan ... should not have his Church also ... why they themselves should not be priests of this demon, who would, perhaps, give them what God did not deign to give ...’
There is every reason to believe that Aradia is a genuine document, for there could be no possible reason to forge such a work. It would hardly attract the attention of anyone but a folk-lorist—and, in fact, it went out of print almost immediately. It provides one of the most powerful pieces of evidence that witchcraft was a survival of a pagan cult of the moon and earth goddess—a fertility cult.
During the First World War, an English archaeologist named Margaret Murray was living in Glastonbury when she decided to study the history of witchcraft. Without, apparently, studying Aradia (at least, she never mentions it), Margaret Murray reached the conclusion that witchcraft was a survival of a pagan fertility cult. It was her view that the image of the devil—as a horned man with a tail—originated in the hunting rituals of our Cro-Magnon ancestors in which the shaman wore the skin of the animal about to be hunted. When man became a farmer rather than a hunter, he directed his magic towards the earth with the object of ensuring a good harvest. These innocent pagan festivals continued down the ages. The Church attempted to stamp them out, partly because they were a pagan survival, partly because of their strong sexual undertones—but in many country areas the ‘old religion’ was simply blended with the new; dances around a maypole replaced the pagan fertility ceremony with its ritual phallus.
In recent years, Margaret Murray’s theory—which was once accepted by most respectable scholars—has been violently attacked, on the grounds that she censored the evidence about witchcraft cults and sabbats to support her theories. And there can be no doubt that her later book The Divine King in England (which appeared when she was 94) is wildly eccentric, with its theory that many English kings were members of the ‘old religion’. Yet no one who looks impartially at the evidence can doubt that witchcraft was closely bound up with the cult of Diana, and that many of its ceremonies were pagan survivals. In his book The Roots of Witchcraft, Michael Harrison mentions that after the Second World War, Professor Geoffrey Webb was given the task of surveying damaged churches, and discovered that many altars of churches built before the Black Death contained stone phalluses. (Scholars have long been puzzled by carvings on many ancient churches showing a crouching woman holding open the lips of her vagina—they are known as Sheila-na-gigs.) Harrison also mentions an event documented in the Bishop’s Register of Exeter in the 14th century, which states that the monks of Frithelstick Priory in Devon were caught by the Bishop worshipping a statue of ‘the unchaste Diana’ in the woods, and made them destroy it. Why ‘unchaste’ Diana, when she is usually known as the ‘queen and huntress, chaste and fair’? Because the Bishop recognised the ceremony for what it was—a fertility ritual.
Amusingly enough, Montague Summers is enraged by the theory of Margaret Murray, and denounces it as imaginative moonshine. He is determined to promote his own view that the witches were genuine heretics, inspired by the devil, and that the church was right to ‘stamp out the infection lest the whole of society be corrupted and damned’. As we have seen, there is a great deal to be said for his opinions—even though he takes them to the point of absurdity. He is almost certainly in the right when he attacks Margaret Murray’s view that Joan of Arc and Gilles de Rais were priests of the Dianic cult who were sacrificed for faith.
All of which only demonstrates that the subject of witchcraft is far more complicated than at first appears.The truth seems to be roughly this: the ‘old religion’ survived from the days of our Cro-Magnon ancestors, and in late Neolithic times led to the construction of stone ‘temples’ like Avebury, Stonehenge and Carnac. This religion involved the invocation of earth spirits and deities—like Van Der Post’s ‘spirits of the Slippery Hills’. It managed to co-exist quietly with Christianity in Europe—although the authors of the Canon Episcopi knew about it nearly a thousand years before John XXII made it a crime. Almost certainly, it had nothing to do with the rise of Catharism, whose roots are in Manichaeism and Gnosticism. But the persecution of the Cathars drew the attention of the Church to the Old Religion, with dire results. In fact, one of the first results of the persecution of witches was probably to cause them to band together and take their stand against the doctrines of Christianity. So, to some extent, the church created the heresy it was so determined to destroy. If we can believe Aradia, they did worship the devil—or Lucifer, the sun god—as well as his sister Diana. And many of them probably practised ancient forms of magic passed down from palaeolithic times. It was not the Church that stamped out witchcraft—it was Newton and Leibniz and Dalton.
And now, it seems, the wheel has come full circle. As we begin to understand something of the mysterious powers of the human mind—as, for example, an increasing number of people recognise that dowsing actually works—we can also begin to sense something of that magical understanding of the universe possessed by our ancestors. As incredible as it sounds, H. G. Wells and Montague Summers can now be reconciled. No doubt they would have hated the idea; but for the rest of us, it opens fascinating prospects.
1 Salmon's vision in the book differs in some particulars from his account on Westward Television; I have preferred the television version, which Salmon claims embodies his considered opinion.
North American Indian shaman conversing with the nature spirits.
A modern dowser investigating the forces of a monolithic standing stone.
CHAPTER 1
Primitive Sorcery
‘The earliest known representation of a deity is in the Caverne des Trois Frères in Ariège, and dates to the late Palaeolithic period. The figure is that of a man clothed in the skin of a stag and wearing on his head the antlers of a stag.’ So says Margaret Murray in the first paragraph of The God of the Witches. We know she was fairly certainly wrong; the figure is not a ‘deity’, but a shaman or a sorcerer dressed for the ritual luring of animals before a hunt. But she is probably correct when she says that figures like this were the origin of the Christian Devil—and the Greek nature god Pan.
In 1963, a science writer named A
lexander Marshack sat at his desk and stared at a photograph of an 8,500 year old bone from Ishango, on the Nile. It was covered with ‘scratches’ or marks, and an academic article that accompanied it suggested that the prehistoric man who made it was playing some kind of arithmetical game. Marshack felt this was wrong. As it happened, he was writing a book about the moon, and he found himself wondering if these notations could have something to do with it. In fifteen minutes he felt he had ‘cracked the code’ of the bone. The marks were made in such a way that it constitued a lunar calendar with its own inbuilt corrections.
He tried out his theory with even older pieces of marked bone, including one from the Dordogne covered with dot marks in a winding pattern—this was perhaps twenty thousand years old, made by one of our Cro-Magnon ancestors. Again, his mathematics convinced him that the marks were basically a lunar calendar, and that the shape of the ‘dots’ showed various phases of the moon. It was, in effect, the earliest writing.
His epoch-making book The Roots of Civilisation, in which he describes his careful research into many other artifacts, is still ignored by many scientists—his views seem too far-fetched. For, after all, what would primitive stone age hunters be doing making such careful notations of the rising and setting of the moon? Why on earth should they need them?
In the 1960s, Professor Gerald Hawkins caused equally sceptical reactions when he published an article in Nature arguing that Stonehenge is basically a solar and lunar calendar—he based his conclusions on computer analysis of the stones. By the time the earliest part of Stonehenge was constructed—about 2,900 BC, our ancestors had become farmers; so it could be argued that they had some practical use for a calender. But surely nothing as massive and elaborate as Stonehenge? Yet the even more elaborate researches of Professor Alexander Thom seemed to confirm that most—probably all—stone circles serve this same function as calendars. But why so many?
The answer to these questions can only be suggested here. The moon affects the tides. It also causes changes in the earth’s magnetic field. Birds and animals use this field for their migrations and for ‘homing’, and evidence presented by Professor Robin Baker of Manchester now suggests that man is also sensitive to these forces and can ‘navigate’ with them. Dowsers sense unusual concentrations of this magnetic force in areas such as Stonehenge, often in spiral patterns. (And a spiral motif seems to be found in primitive carvings all over the world.)
Primitive man recognised these forces, and he sensed the way that they are affected by the moon, the sun and the planets. It was this sense of a magical relationship between the earth and the solar system that led to his early interest in the heavens. He also believed—rightly or wrongly—that the earth is permeated with spirit forces, and that these can also be propitiated and used by human beings. So the chief task of the primitive witch or shaman was to form a bridge between the human, visible world, and this invisible world of spirits and heavenly forces.
In most ancient cultures the moon was the goddess of magic. And, significantly, she was also the earth goddess. In Greek mythology, Selene the moon goddess blends into Demeter, the earth goddess; Astarte, the Canaanite moon goddess is also the earth goddess. (The planet Venus also blends into these identifications, possibly because it was, next to the moon, the strongest influence on the earth’s field.)
What precisely did the ancient priests do at Stonehenge or Avebury, or even older circles? Let us confess frankly that the answer is: we have no idea. Modern primitive ceremonies to propitiate the earth spirits may offer us the likeliest clue. But stories of ju-ju (some of them cited in the Introduction) should remind us that we are not speaking simply of some pagan religion, the ancient equivalent of a modern Church of England service. Some strange and often violent reaction between man and nature lay at the heart of these rituals.
CHAPTER 2
The Coming of The Witches
Why did the performance of magic pass from the male shaman to the female witch? The likeliest answer is that as man taught himself the arts of agriculture, life became more settled and the shaman no longer had to perform his hunting magic. Says Jacob Grimm in his Teutonic Mythology: ‘To woman, not to man, was assigned the culling and concocting of powerful remedies, as well as the cooking of food ...The restless lives of men were filled up with war, hunting, agriculture and handicrafts; to women experience and convenient leisure lent every qualification for secret sorcery. Woman's imagination is warmer and more susceptible, and times an inner sacred power of divination was revered in her.’
Long before Margaret Murray, indeed, half a century before Leland’s Aradia, Grimm realised that witch ceremonies are derived from pagan festivals; he mentions Walpurgis Night (May 1) as a ‘grand annual excursion of witches’, pointing out that it is the ‘date of a sacrificial feast and the old May-gathering of the people’. ‘To Christian zealots all dancing appears sinful ... and sure enough it often was derived from pagan rites, like other harmless pleasures and customs ... Hence the old dancings at Shrovetide, at the Easter Fire and May Fire.’ ‘The witches invariably resort to places where formerly justice was administered, or sacrifices were offered.’ And he adds that many ‘conjuring spells’ have nothing to do with the devil, but far more often refer to the ‘elvish’—to nature spirits. So, with the instinct of a lifelong student of folklore, Grimm concludes that the real essence of witchcraft is ‘milder’ and more pagan than Christian zealots recognise.
In fact, the world of the witches, as it emerges in Grimm’s researches, is the world of elves and fairies, of woodlands and mountain-tops and ancient sacred places, not of blasphemous rituals and invocations of the powers of hell.
CHAPTER 3
The Left Hand Path
It must have been a temptation to the Stone Age shaman to use his power to get his own way, or to revenge insults. As Tolkien's Gandalf remarks: ‘Wizards are impatient and quick to anger’.
But to use his powers for personal ends raises certain problems for the magician. The ‘you’, the personality, lives in the left-brain. The ‘non-you’ lives in the right, the unconscious. This is the source of creativity, of what Keats led ‘negative capability’. Gurdjieff called it ‘essence’. And non-you is almost certainly the source of magical powers. To use these for left-brain purposes is to risk cutting them off the source.
In that case, ‘black magic’ ought to be impossible—or at least, self-defeating, gradually depleting the powers of the magician. Why is this not so? Because, according to the world-wide magical tradition, the black magician can make use of low-grade spirits to carry out his bidding.
In doing so, he (or she) is not being wicked so much as stupid. He is foregoing real power for the satisfaction of the ego.
Real magic—the ‘right hand path’—depends on learning to use the ‘true will’, which seems to reside in the right. (At least, the right is the gateway to it.) In that sense, black magic is a counterfeit, a deceit.
However, men being what they are, the left hand path was bound to flourish. One of the most frequently used methods of magic was the making of images, usually of wax.
An early Egyptian manuscript—the Westcar Papyrus (about 2700 BC)—tells how the king’s steward destroyed his wife’s lover by making a wax crocodile, ‘seven spans long’, which turned into a real crocodile when the lover came down to bathe and killed him. But it was far more common to model the intended victim—or sometimes only the heart—in wax, and then to drive needles into the figure or melt it.
The making of figurines is the oldest of all magical practices.
The earliest magic was hunting magic, and the stone age drawings of animals in caves were not intended as artistic representations but as magical images intended to influence the actual animals.